Thrill of going where no one has gone before

Between reading Balzac and Chekhov and Tolstoy, and manuscripts by young fiction writers, and new work by such wonderful contemporaries as
Joan Didion
and
Richard Ford
and
Richard Bausch
and
Marilynne Robinson
and
Lynn Freed
and
Stacey D'Erasmo
, and trying to write new fiction of my own, I have to confess that I sometimes do the literary equivalent of sneaking off and chomping down a Big Mac with a shake and fries.

It happens, I suppose, because I began as a reader with sea stories and science fiction, and despite the recent Patrick O'Brian craze, there aren't enough good sea stories to go around. But there is plenty of science fiction, and I suspect (and hope) there always will be -- as long as writers and readers care to exercise their imaginations and try to conjure up a future based on their attentive reading about the past and their curiosity about the present.

Historians of the genre sometimes take its origins back to certain speculative passages in Plato and to utopian fantasies. Most readers see its rise as concurrent with the advent of modern scientific thought and invention. In many ways, science fiction is the poetry of technology, an odd subspecies of literature that incorporates psychology and mystery, philosophy, theology, ethnology and, in the hands of some of its finest practitioners, a scientist's awareness of physics, biology, astronomy and other technical disciplines.

For me, it's usually about time and the imagination. About the nature of what has been and what is to come -- about how to tell about time.

And it's about my time, too, about how I give my working imagination some ease with reading that turns loose the bonds that usually entangle it with the real things of real time past and present, with fiction that does what all good literature does -- frees me from who I am and where I am and what I am so that when I finish the story or novel in front of me, and return to the realm we call the real, I am somehow more than I was when I first began to read it.

So while some science-fiction fans focus on those books that speculate on what it means to be human -- by studying an imaginative approximate of the alien -- and some turn to the intricacies of future technology, and some give themselves over to matters more fantastic than specifically scientific, for me the stories that hold my interest best and give me the most freedom from my usual round of writing and reading and living are those that focus on the nature and problem of time.

That's what pulp writer and Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard was doing back in 1950 when he published his novel "To the Stars," newly reissued as part of a Hubbard renaissance engineered by a Los Angeles press dedicated to his work only. The book is a slender narrative ("minimalist" before its time, some critics might call it) about a young engineer from the Midwest of the not- so-distant future named Alan Corday. Hoping to make his fortune (and thus win the hand of his fiancee) by shipping out for Mars, Corday goes to the wrong bar at the wrong time and finds himself kidnapped by the captain of an interstellar spaceship and his crew of misfits worthy of Capt. Ahab's Pequod.

As Hubbard describes these renegades and naysayers, "They had no purpose. They had no goal. They were outcasts, condemned to exist until they died without home or friends behind the skin of this vessel, accomplishing nothing. " Unlike Ahab's crew, they have no whale in view, just star after star with planets that they hope will yield some valuable finds, usually metals, for the folks back on Earth. Unlike any crew that's ever sailed the seas or gone into space, they experience the dilation of time, as based on Einstein's theory, so that as their ship approaches the speed of light, time slows down for them. On their expeditions, six weeks is equivalent to nine years of life on Earth, and under the aegis of a ship's doctor thousands of years old, they gradually become accustomed to living long after everyone they knew and everything they cared about on Earth has crumbled into dust.

As in a number of groundbreaking -- or time-breaking, I suppose we ought to say -- works of science fiction, the science behind the story is more interesting than the fiction itself. Hubbard is a thinker who writes, rather than a writer who thinks, as most masters are. And eventually he founded a religion to prove it.

Octogenarian science fiction writer Frederick Pohl professes no religion in his work but writes like a demigod, with dozens of books to his credit, many of them setting the standard for excellence in what has become, since the days of Hubbard, a rather crowded field. His so-called "Gateway" series, inaugurated in 1977 with the publication of a novel of the same name, offers some of the most entertaining, sophisticated and thought-provoking novel reading in the genre. It gives us the universe of an interstellar species dubbed the Heechee. These furry little creatures with a vast grasp of science left spaceships behind on an abandoned asteroid relatively close to Earth before retreating into a black hole in the center of our galaxy.

The appearance last month of "The Boy Who Would Live Forever," Pohl's sixth "Gateway" novel, and one that is both a summing-up and (given a detail at the very end of it) possibly a stepping-stone to yet another novel about this material, will give a large number of fans real pleasure. The title of the first chapter, "From Istanbul to the Stars," lays out the trajectory of the story, as two teenagers from Istanbul -- Olton, or "Tan," a native of Turkey, and Stan, the son of an American employee at the U.S. Embassy -- find themselves catapulted into a series of events that lead them first to Gateway, and then to interstellar travel.

Stan is the boy of the novel's title, and his education about life on the worlds beyond the near stars becomes our education. Love, sex and the nature of family make up a large part of his growing knowledge. And the technology of the future, as Pohl imagines it, bubbles up in these pages in many fascinating ways, from invisible robot chefs to the fine distinctions between life as computerized data and life as an organic being. But behind it all is the news about death and time -- because as young Stan comes to discover while living on Forested Planet of Warm Old Star Twenty-Four in the center of the Heechee's black-hole hideaway, time for him has dilated. As Pohl writes, "He ... had been -- what? -- maybe six or seven days in the Core, no more than that. But those six or seven Core days were 40,000 times six or seven as many days out in the galaxy. That came to centuries -- maybe even a thousand years!"

From before Hubbard to Pohl and, I hope, beyond, that is what this peculiarly speculative genre means to me: a place where story effaces time, one that gives me hope that I can live in the house of the word forever. 